First Time
by TheHiddenMemory
Summary: It's been thirteen days, the first time Finch owes Reese his life. Early season 1.


It's been thirteen days, the first time Finch owes Reese his life. Thirteen days of brittle partnership and veiled scrutiny and teetering potential outcomes of disastrous consequence.

"Dare I ask?" Finch asks while Reese folds his long frame behind the wheel and there's a dark smudge on the white of Reese's cuff and scuff marks on his suit sleeve. Newly acquired.

"Depends on whether you want an answer," Reese equivocates. And Finch expects he doesn't, but he feels compelled to ask, because he has assembled from ashes and when the foundations crumble and erupt and destroy it is he that has unleashed the flame.

He says nothing.

There's no idle chatter but the silence speaks in uncharted intervals of mutual observation and tenuous accord.

Reese sits loose and relaxed in a way Finch can never achieve. The assumptions would be disingenuous.

Reese sees it first.

His hand flies outward, shoving hard and fast behind the smaller man's shoulders.

Finch's forehead collides against the console in front of the passenger seat an instant before the car's back window explodes inward and shards of glass rain down on the backseat. The front window follows.

Finch is bent forward at angles his broken body is no longer meant to bend, trapped in ways in which he is unaccustomed. A chaos he does not understand.

Reese's hand is forceful against the back of his neck and Finch thinks he's made a horrible mistake, because this is Reese's world not his and it was farcical to think the two could meet in any capacity. Reese's hand is against his neck, restraining, and there's no contest, no contest when it comes to this.

There's screeching tires and gunshots and shattered glass.

Reese leaping from the car.

More gunshots that cut sound into uneven intervals of menace. Then silence.

Finch has yet to regain his center of gravity when Reese returns to the driver's seat; more dark smudges and scuff marks and torn fabric. More silence.

It's a white-hot fire, the pain from the center of Finch's neck to the base of his spine, and he drags his body upright, stiff and unseemly and grossly inadequate.

The ex-CIA agent is watching him with a subtle intensity that strips layers with unpretentious accuracy, and he is far, far more intelligent, more proficiently intrusive, than Finch had ever anticipated.

Reese breaks silence first, nodding to the dashboard. "Heat of the moment. Forgot my own strength. Didn't mean to be so rough with you back there." There's a trace of levity and a pull to the corner of his mouth, and Finch had not anticipated this either; Reese's mild, teasing persona; his humility. Because the words are lies, they both know. Finch's body is mangled pieces strewn together, damaged by his own injudiciousness, and Reese knows it as much as he pretends he doesn't.

There's broken glass in Finch's lap. A bullet hole in the dashboard.

"I imagine," Finch hedges, dragging his eyes away and forcing syllables through short breaths and carefully erected boundaries, "that it's preferable to the alternative."

Reese's mouth tugs upward further with perceptible mirth, and Finch doesn't understand how the man can be so _calm_ when his own veins are vibrating with the aftermath of being _shot_ at.

It's only then that Finch registers the gun. And Finch does not like guns in the most unobtrusive of moments, let alone ones following uncontrolled bursts of chaos that are so profoundly different when felt in absolute tangibility than when heard in simple intrusion through a com line in his ear. Reese is lifting the pistol from his lap to empty its rounds and Finch flinches involuntarily. The ex-CIA agent's movements falter, his fingers pausing over the barrel. And Finch regrets his misstep instantly. Because it's one thing to admit to an aversion to weapons and another all together to reveal the extent of it in such intimate capacity. Finch knows men like John Reese. John Reese, ex-government assassin, dangerous and deadly and skilled in deception and exploitation of the crudest kind. He will latch onto every weakness, twisting each to his whim. He will jeer and belittle; laugh in the face of such feebleness. He will manipulate and exploit and dig and cut and dismantle until there is nothing but bone and the ghost of stripped dignity.

Only Reese doesn't.

Reese, ex-government assassin, trained and mastered to exploit weakness through techniques of the worst kind, looks between Finch and the gun in his hand, lowers it slowly, transfers it to the hand furthest from Finch, and tucks it into the waistband of his slacks. And says nothing at all.


End file.
